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Personal Morality

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softwareNerd

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Note: I'm starting this topic in the Premium forum, but hope to move it to "Ethics" at some point.

Caveat: The Ayn Rand quotes are from the new "Answers" book. Therefore, one can assume that they have a less "edited for publication" formulation than what Ayn Rand published in (say) "VoS".

Preliminaries: "VoS", has an Ayn Rand essay titled "The Ethics of Emergencies" that discusses the application of ethics in the context of an emergency. This has been discussed on the forum before. Some previous threads are: this, and this, and this. There are others. So, I don't want to repeat that discussion here.

Background: [From pp 113-114 of the new "Answers" book.] At a Ford Hall Forum speech in 1968, a questioner asked Ayn Rand about ethics in a life-threating situation. Would it be right to kill an innocent person, in order to save one's life. Ayn Rand gave him an explanation of the special context of an emergency, an answer that would be familiar to those who have read the "Ethics of Emergencies" essay.

At the end of her reply, she said the following:

I don't think I could kill an innocent bystander if my life was in danger...

Earlier in the reply, she said the following, which might clarify:

Moral rules cannot be prescribed for such situations.... Whatever a man choose in such cases is right -- subjectively.

Also:

Personally, I would say the man is immoral if he takes an innocent life. But, formally, as a moral philosopher, I'd say that in such emergency situations, no one could prescribe what action is appropriate.

My question: Is there a "personal morality"? What does it mean? Is it the same as "optional values"?

Now, let me quote the whole sentence, where I only quoted the first clause before. I think it is quintessential Ayn Rand:

I don't think I could kill an innocent bystander if my life was in danger; I think I could kill ten if my husband's life was in danger.
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I don't think Ayn Rand meant to imply that morality as such could differ from person to person; I think she was, in a way, exempting such situations from moral judgment. I think when she used the word "personally," she was saying something along the lines of, "I personally wouldn't like they guy, but I'm unwilling to place a real moral judgment on him."

Emergency situations are such that they dictate instantaneous action, with no time for a rational weighing of all of the options available and their consequences. That doesn't mean that values shouldn't guide our actions in emergencies, though, because we still have a means of making judgments based on them--emotions. In normal situationss, we should think about our emotions and determine what they are a response to before acting on them, but in emergency situations, there's no time for all of that. You need to act now. All actions need to be guided by someting, and emotions are lightning-quick guides to actions based on the values one holds.

I find her use of the word subjective really interesting and also remarkably accurate and precise. Subjectivism, as a primacy of consciousness metaphysics, is incorrect, but it's also the way a lot of people really function on a day to day basis--the use their whims, i.e. their emotions, as a guide to knowledge. Because in emergency situations, emotions are the only guide that one has quick enough access too, it is a form of necessitated subjectivism, which gives rise to subjective morality within the context of the emergency only.

Edited by dondigitalia
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Is there a "personal morality"? What does it mean? Is it the same as "optional values"?
I think that morality is fundamentally personal. Here are some of Rand's statements with underlining added as relevant to show in part why I think so. (FTNI 18) "Morality is a code of values to guide man's choices and actions; when it is set to oppose his own life and mind, it makes him turn against himself and blindly act as the tool of his own destruction.", (VOS Intro): "The first step is to assert man's right to a moral existence—that is: to recognize his need of a moral code to guide the course and the fulfillment of his own life", (p. 30) "To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man's highest moral purpose.", (p. 51): "Love and friendship are profoundly personal, selfish values: love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns and derives from love.", "The Objectivist ethics would tell him: your highest moral purpose is the achievement of your own happiness, your money is yours, use it to save your wife, that is your moral right and your rational, moral choice" and (p. 52): "Since one's own happiness is the moral purpose of one's life, the man who fails to achieve it because of his own default, because of his failure to fight for it, is morally guilty."

I find the discussion of optional values in Smith's Viable Values on p. 99-100 particularly enlightening. To quote briefly, "For a thing to be valuable means that it promotes a person's life. Many different things may bear this relation to a given individual...Some things will be values for everyone, while others will legitimately vary". I am not much in favor of the expression "personal morality" because it suggests whim and subjectivism, but if we get beyond any bad connotations that the expression has, and focus on Rand's definition of morality - "a code of values to guide man's choices and actions" - then it is inescapable that this is personal, in applying to your choices and actions.

Anyhow, that's my take on it.

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This problem of emergencies is one reason why it's so vastly important to make sure your emotions line up with your rational convictions, otherwise you will be torn in two when it comes time to make a difficult decision in a hurry. I think it's fairly apparent that Ayn Rand was projecting her likely emotional state should she have to make such a decision.

Since she believed so deeply that all men can be great, I could easily understand her unwillingness to destroy greatness in potentia to save herself. To save her husband, however, would be a different matter. She (as I understand it) adored him; he was great. So destroying greatness in potentia would not matter to her as much as preserving his greatness in fact.

Her consideration that she was not particularly great in her own person came up in another place, Dr. Peikoff wrote briefly about it in "My Thirty Years With Ayn Rand", published in The Voice of Reason:

"You are suffering the fate of a genius trapped in a rotten culture," I would begin. "My distinctive attribute," she would retort, "is not genius, but intellectual honesty." "That is part of it," I would concede, "but after all I am intellectually honest, too, and it doesn't make me the kind of epochal mind that can write Atlas Shrugged or discover Objectivism." "One can't look at oneself that way," she would answer me. "No one can say: 'Ah me! the genius of the ages.' My perspective as a creator has to be not 'How great I am' but 'How true this idea is and how clear, if only men were honest enough to face the truth.'" So, for understandable reasons, we reached an impasse. She kept hoping to meet an equal; I knew that she never would. For once, I felt, I had the broad historical perspective, the perspective on her, that in the nature of the case she could not have.

There is and always will be a fundamental difference between you and everyone else: you live in the "dark behind the eyes" (Terry Pratchett) and everyone else doesn't.

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I don't think Ayn Rand meant to imply that morality as such could differ from person to person; I think she was, in a way, exempting such situations from moral judgment.
On the first part of this, this is correct but you have to keep in mind the distinction between "moral principle" and "specific choice". As Tara Smith says, insulin can be good for diabetics and bad for hypoglycemics. What is constant is the goal -- living. What may be individual (personal) is the particular choice, which differs because the facts of the individual are different. Case in point: because of this annoying involuntary deficiency in my cones, I have problems with distinguishing things of certain colors, so it is bad for me for others to convey information via certain color distinctions (it's more nuanced than that, but this will do for now), and it can be somewhat debilitating for me to not "get it" when differentiations depend on stuff that I just cannot get. For other people, certain uses of color is life-enhancing. Even me -- I love good use of color, but you just have to do it right so that I get it (this is not a claim on anyone else's life, just a warning that I will assert my right to bitch). This putative red/green distinction is an optional value. Not murdering (idem not lying, stealing etc), OTOH, is not a rational optional value.
Emergency situations are such that they dictate instantaneous action, with no time for a rational weighing of all of the options available and their consequences.
That's true, but there is another aspect to the emergency issue, namely that often you don't actually have a moral choice. Imagine the scenario where you're trapped by an evil person who presents you with the choice "Kill this child, or I will kill you. You may take as much time as you need, up to 3 years, to decide". Many supposed emergency scenarios involve responses to immoral acts. In considering a true emergency (not an emergency mixed with the negation of morality) it's important to concretize this in terms of something that's just an emergency, for example, you wake up suddenly and find that your house is very seriously on fire and you are faced with the choice of saving your dog or your wife, then maybe you were just totally wrong about whether your wife could get out of the house on her own. An erroneous decision is not an immoral one.
Because in emergency situations, emotions are the only guide that one has quick enough access too...
I haven't thought about this in detail, but do the quick conclusions that you reach without careful thought emotions? I don't think I'm being emotional in saying that quick judgments are not necessarily emotions, but that's just my emotional response. Well, I know where to look...
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On the first part of this, this is correct but you have to keep in mind the distinction between "moral principle" and "specific choice".

I agree, my statement was intended to be directed toward principles, rather than concretes. That's what I meant by morality "as such." Individual, concrete values can vary greatly from person to person, but the principles involved really don't.

I haven't thought about this in detail, but do the quick conclusions that you reach without careful thought emotions? I don't think I'm being emotional in saying that quick judgments are not necessarily emotions, but that's just my emotional response. Well, I know where to look...

I do think that on-the-spot, automatic judgments are emotional in nature, although I'm open to being made aware of possibilities I hadn't considered. A lot of people refer to these automatic reactions as instinct, (instinct, in this context means: an automatic conclusion supplied by the subconciousness, utilizing automatized, internalized thought processes) rather than emotion. The way these types of judgments manifest themselves, to me anyway, is emotional, or at least mystic in some way. I just have a gut feeling, rather than having to think about it. That's really the nature of the distinction I was trying to describe. I'm not really married to the idea of calling it "emotional" though.

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This reminded me of a thought I had recently. On my plane ride down here to Nicaragua from Miami, my mind started to wander and I tried to think about what I would do in the following situation.

The plane was flying down the Florida coastline and I thought, "What if we found a nuclear weapon on board?" Supposing the timer was setup that given the time of discovery, the choice was to either drop it on land-dwelling civilians and save the passangers and crew, or take the plane away from the coast as far as possible and drop it in the ocean, but then killing yourself since no escape from the blast is possible due to the shortage of time. So, either expose innocents on land to the bomb, or you and the plane (with certain death for you and everyone on board). Supposing you were in charge and had the choice, what would you do?

After answering this, suppose your closest family were on board with you, say your wife and kids, what then?

As for the original question, I think it's already been answered: as a moral philosopher AR prescribes broad general principles, that one must act to keep and/or attain the highest value possible, and that whether a thing is properly a value to you is determined by a proper method based on proper premises; however, proper moral philosophers don't prescribe moral rules to specific situations, they don't tell you specifically not to covet your neighbor's wife or whatever.

It is in this sense that there is a difference between formal moral philosophy and its application. Its application is inherently dependent on the applyer, since not all men have the same value hierarchies. So, if you want to call the personal application of formal morality "personal morality," I suppose that's ok. Personally I would avoid this terminology, since it implies subjectivism in an unspecified manner.

PS

Should we give Burgess access to the premium forums, if we haven't already?

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What if we found a nuclear weapon on board?" Supposing the timer was setup that given the time of discovery, the choice was to either drop it on land-dwelling civilians and save the passangers and crew, or take the plane away from the coast as far as possible and drop it in the ocean, but then killing yourself since no escape from the blast is possible due to the shortage of time. So, either expose innocents on land to the bomb, or you and the plane (with certain death for you and everyone on board). Supposing you were in charge and had the choice, what would you do?

After answering this, suppose your closest family were on board with you, say your wife and kids, what then?

Every time I start to think about this question, my mind takes off on a different path: as in, "there must be a way out". Could we get to a desert fast enough to drop it and get away? If we just went a little bit out to sea, got into rafts and scuttled the plane, would the plane be deep enough, and could we get far enough away to make it feasible? Is our plane somewhere near Tehran :o

If my family was on the plane, I cannot imagine blowing them up. I'd say the same would be true if it were just me and if the area we were bombing held nobody close to me. I do find it intriguing though that I feel more certainity about the "if I had family" choice than the other one.

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Every time I start to think about this question, my mind takes off on a different path: as in, "there must be a way out".
That's a good path: it's wrong to start from the position "Somebody has to die, now who?". My preferred option would be to drop it from 32,000 ft into the ocean, failing that into the desert, or the mountains, or Hog Holler. The more challenging situation is where I discover this bomb flying over Columbus at 32,000 ft. with 5 minutes to detonation, and my family is at home below. I suppose I would let it blow me up. (Beats me why I'm flying over Columbus at 32,000 feet and not landing, but whatever). OTOH if the city beneath were NYC, bye-bye New York.
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Actually, I'd probably radio a bomb squad to meet us at the airport, and land the plane. Someone rigged it up. Surely someone is smart enough to turn it off. I'm imaging a film-scene where the bad-guys put large LED count-down clocks on their nukes. :P

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